Page 3 of When her Duke Returns
“My Lady, I don’t think it can be pulled any tighter!”
Mary twisted her head back, her hands taught over the rails of her bedframe. “Well, you must try! I shan’t stroll around the park with my stays around my calves. You could stuff a chicken down there with the room you’ve left.”
“You always speak with such grace, dearest,” her mother retorted from where she was sitting in the corner of Lady Mary’s bedchamber. “Should you come to tire of matrimony or your embroidery, you could always take up the epistolary craft.”
“No, it simply won’t go, My Lady. Perhaps we could try one of your newer corsets?” Honora pressed again once the Dowager’s venom had settled.
“The ones you favor are soFrench, my dear. Though, even they would agree they are largely out of fashion.”
“I’ve no mind for what’s in fashion, Mama. I enjoy that which flatters me and no more,” Mary said with a huff. She stood straight and brushed the hair from her flushed face, the stays around her waist slipping toward her hips. “I shall make this one fit.”
“Then you shall have to gorge yourself on pudding,” her mother replied, barely lifting her gaze from her sewing. “Choose something else for today, Honora. We shall visit a seamstress before the week’s end, lest Lady Mary age against the grain of time and wake up a girl of seventeen with a midriff like a barrel.”
The girl nodded and delicately laid a simple cotton morning gown on the bed alongside a silver spencer.
Her mother rose from her seat. “I shall take over from here, Honora. Please tell Miriam we shall be down to break our fasts within the hour.” With a nod, the girl was dismissed.
“You mustn’t screech at the maids like a child, Mary,” her mother began, gesturing for her daughter to remove her stays. She pulled a new corset from Mary’s closet and began wrapping it around her. “It’s hardly becoming of a lady.”
“I shall remind you of that when next John prunes the wrong perennials.”
At that, the Countess spun her daughter around. “I am not your enemy. You may think I am until the day you die, but it will not be true. I certainly held my mother in no grand esteem until I had a girl of my own.”
Mary bit her cheek. She was a woman in her twenty-first year of life, and still, she suffered the rebukes of her mother as she had when she was four. She turned away. “I apologize, Mama,” she said sourly at last. “I hardly mean any of it.”
“I know, my dear,” her mother said. “Now, put these wild fancies to rest, and enlighten me as to what worries you so. Should I hazard at your impending nuptials?”
She shook her head. Mary had long known she would wed. She had known it from her earliest memories. To be born a woman was to be born a wife. For many years, she had simply pushed the truth of the matter away and had focused instead on all that which was most ladylike: her sewing, promenades before supper, thebeau monde,and the thrill of the Season...
When womanhood beckoned, however, and talk turned instead to the gruesome matters of birthing heirs and moving away from one’s home, it was as if the majesty of the matter broke.
Her betrothal had soured her in a way that lay far beyond words. She suffered that same, eerie feeling now as she looked at her mother’s reflection in the looking glass, one that was too much like her own what with their matching mahogany-colored eyes and hair as if history were repeating itself—something she realized when she caught the reflection of both herself and her mother in the looking glass, one behind the other, with their matching mahogany-colored eyes and hair.
“Have you ever felt listless toward life?”
Her mother drew in a sharp breath and began fastening her daughter’s corset tighter. “No, my dear, I can’t say I have.”
“You’ve never felt as though the world was pushing you one way, and you were pushing it another?” The words were spilling from the girl like runoff from rain to a gutter. “As though, no matter how much you might try, you could not force yourself to be content with your lot?”
“I cannot say I’ve ever experienced that, no. I find that joy comes most naturally to those of decent breeding. We do have so many things to be thankful for.”
“Shall I take it, you have no advice?”
“Oh, I certainly could conjure some. As a woman, I would advise you to take up a new hobby and keep busy. As a mother…” the Dowager paused and thought deeply. “Asyourmother, I would encourage you to look closely at the world and realize that you are not so badly off as you might want to believe. There as worse fates than being a Carlisle, my dear.”
Mary nodded in half-hearted agreement. After all, it was precisely those other fates over which she stewed.
As if to awaken her from her thoughts, Lady Carlisle placed a tender hand on Mary’s back once the matter of her corset had been resolved, running it in soft circles as she had often done when her daughter was yet a child.
“Are you quite all right, Mama?” Mary asked, her voice kept low.
“I am, my darling, though not so unaware as you might think,” she replied then breathed in sharply and stepped away.
“Come!” she said at once as if suddenly an entirely different person. “Your brothers shall have our heads if we do not hurry down and make for Summerhead before luncheon. Besides, I must keep my Harry in check. Your betrothed shall be livid if he beats him at cards again, and we do not want to offend him so close to your engagement ball.”
ChapterTwo
“You might have written, dear, instead of springing yourself on us with no warning.”
